.poorly-known

Webmention is the modern counterpart: https://indieweb.org/Webmention

(The IndieWeb wiki is probably the best resource for exploring the personal website-based social networking tech nowadays. I recommend the author check it out and maybe iterate on that instead :)

Your app picks up a bunch of feeds and composes them into a nice page for you, much like an RSS feed reader. The twist is that each feed is encrypted in a way that only you can decrypt, so the cryptography also gives strong identity guarantees, and allows for private messaging.

It's basically PGP + RSS, only mapped to a bunch of files of specific structure. Those could be RSS/ATOM feeds instead of JSON, to reuse an existing format. The reuse of the ideas is good, these ideas are time-proven.

As any PGP-lookalike, this thing has the key distribution problem, and won't scale to billions of users due to that. Key rotation and revocation is another problem. But for a small-scale network it should be fine, and can run on very tiny, very low-power devices, maybe even with intermittent connectivity.

But in all fairness it seems like a reasonable system, given the narrow scope of its goals. It does not scale, but that's on purpose. Although I could still see "Feed Aggregation" becoming impractical even with a small number of friends with a modest number of posts.

Cryptographically, a problem is that it makes ciphertexts publicly enumerable, protected by a X25519-derived key. This makes it very vulnerable to harvest-now-decrypt-later attacks, if you believe quantum computing will ever happen.

So a database, that you can send a network response or request with that data, that when received by a client, builds a static website.

I see.

I see...

> Key Rotation (Unfollow)

    _  /
    .  .

That should scale pretty well. The HTTP fetch of posts/index.json could use conditional get requests to avoid downloading the body when there are no changes. Static files are dirt cheap to serve.

Does the polling need to be fast? I think back to mailing lists and the huge delays involved in those conversations. Yet they were/are often very productive. Somewhere between Twitter/X speed and mailing list speed might be acceptable.

Maybe this would be better with a LiveJournal style interface. Medium length posts with threaded comments/replies are an underrated format.

Maybe that's a feature rather than a bug

Real question for people who know what they’re talking about:

is perfect forward secrecy no longer considered valuable?

Thanks for this, nice concept. This would be good on a Tor onion service.

I wonder what the signing is for if you already have a domain name to verify your authorship.

Webmention is cool indeed. Also one of few techniques that’s currently free of some corp’s greedy roadmap